My Beautiful Face for Sale / Buy It Now for $17.99

A few years ago I learned that someone was selling mail art on EBay. Being the person that I am, I wanted to know a little more about this. For me, it’s always been a thing for mail-artists not to sell work, that’s what I was told from the start. Don’t sale! Not that I really care, because I don’t. I wasn’t up in arms when I saw mail-art for sale, I was simply interested in the impulse. I saw an opportunity to think through something, so I took it. I contacted a handful of people, sent some emails, and got a few quotes. In the end, I didn’t post my short essay because of a personal conflict. I didn’t want to get in the way of someone making a few dollars.

This all started because I noticed a mail-artist I had sent things to, had started to sell things I had sent them. My work was in a lot with others. From what I could tell it never seemed to sale. Outside of the two or three big mail art names, I doubt you could make any money selling these things online. The ridiculousness of it all, the lack of profitability, I found entertaining. No one cares what I make so no one has any interest in paying for it. If they won’t something, I’ll give it to them, just send me your address. The futile nature of it all was entertaining to me.

To better engage in this, a way to make it all into a more creative endeavor, I started to send the seller a lot of cards I made. For a period of time I sent a large pile cards that contained my face. These are the sorts of cards I normally send to friends for birthday messages or thank you notes. They’re meant to be silly, they’re meant to get the recipient to smile at my dumb antics. If any of my work ends up in a public space, it does so on the refrigerators of my friends. From there it probably moves directly to the trash. 

This is the card I sent.

 

Sending cards of my face to the seller was essentially a dare. I was trying to get the seller to unload cards with my face on them. In my mind it would be funny as hell to click on a listing and see me starting back.  Just yesterday, J. Tostado let me know that one of my cards was for sale on EBay in a lot with other pieces and ephemera. Guess what, he was selling one of these stupid cards with my face on them. Underneath the image was the repeated phrase, “The Surface of Reality.” Deep shit, right? He wins. The circle is complete.

No bids, yet. The first bid is set for $12.99 with a buy it price of $17.99. I think the shipping price of $6.30 seems a little low to me. Included in the lot is roughly eleven items. If all things are equal, it means that my card is worth about a dollar. A single stamp costs sixty-eight cents, which according to my calculations, my postcard has increased in value in its travels. From this standpoint, the seller is basically my art dealer, promoting my work, and increasing it in value. After sending thousands of things through the mail I have finally found the recognition I think I deserve. 

The EBay listing information.

 

Makings in the Year 2025

I’ve always tallied up the amount of mail that comes in and goes out. No idea why I do this? 

The 2024 Tally

 

Here is the pattern. I get mail out of the post office box, open it up, put it in a wicker basket under my TV, and then take it upstairs to count when the basket fills up. I note each piece from every mail artist. At the end of the year I put together a tally of what I’ve received. I also do this for what I send out. Normally I send out a giant pile of stuff at one time and not to any particular person. Some of the work could have been sitting for two weeks or two months, I make a lot so it tends to pile. I go to my address book and then go through the tally, focusing on the ones that show a mild imbalance of mail. I mail to them first. If I have something special to send out I’ll mail that to specific folks whenever I’m done with that piece. After putting the addresses on, I add the amount I sent to the overall total and at the end of the year I add it all up.

So…by this logic, I received 442 things and mailed 414. However, this isn’t correct.

The numbers aren’t right. While the received amount is probably on point, or at least close to it, the amount I’ve sent in 2024 is way off. Most weeks I send a random piece to this specific person, a reply, a letter, something bigger that doesn’t always get counted. If there’s not an original collage in the bunch I don’t always count that either. I feel like I’m cheating people if there’s not something original in an envelope. But none of that is the biggest discrepancy, friends and family are. I don’t count the mail art (collages, cards either original or “professionally printed”) that I send to friends and family. I don’t count those because I never get anything back from them. In a calendar year I get maybe four postcards from folks I personally know, and then maybe ten Christmas cards at the end of the year. Not worth keeping a tally. No problem, I don’t expect anything in return, it’s just what I do.

However, the amount I send to friends and family can be a lot. For some folks I sent ten to fifteen cards / mailings / pieces of garbage a year. That amount could be sent to as many as thirty or forty people. That’s a lot of mail! Anyway, basically I’m saying that I send out a lot of stuff in a year and it’s almost impossible to keep it all straight. No one needs this information, I just like collecting it. By the way, I keep two address books, one for mail-artists and one for friends and family.

In thinking back on this past year of mail-art (my focus for this post…I guess) I’m struck by the amount. I send too much. I really should pull back a bit. I know it’s not a typical new year’s resolution to do less, but I feel like I should. Not make less, just send less. So much of what I receive is underwhelming that I shouldn’t feel guilty if I’m not responding quickly and in kind. I’ll get to you at some point, but I’m tired of trying to keep up because of my own ridiculously imposed rules.

Some of the ways I’m going to limit my post is to step up my little library drop offs. Whenever the local thrift stores have sales on frames, I can get them for cheaper than what a stamp costs. I can put the collage in a frame, drop it off to a little library, and walk away. It’s almost the exact feeling as putting a stamp on something and then dropping it in the mail, but I tend to get weird responses from the libraries, almost exclusively bad. Provoking a rare little library response is a lot more rewording than the overall ambivalence that comes from mailing something. People get so mad at something they could break or toss in the trash. I’m giving you a frame, think about it that way.

And more…more rambling goals.

I need to thin out my materials. Being a thrift store junkie is great for finding random pieces, but often you use two or three things but initially buy fifty. You end up with forty-eight things you can’t use. So, for the coming year I’m going to consistently make collage packets for kids and leave them wherever I can. Asking if adults want a bunch of weird paper online never works, no one ever wants them.

I will continue to not listen to people with suggestions about how to monetize my work.

I will continue to not pursue putting my creations on the wall of a “gallery” or public space.

I will continue to assume no one cares about any of this, and make what I want.

I want to do a series of record covers. Not record covers for bands, although I’m more than open to that idea, but recreations of record covers. This might be cuter than anything. I might use Miles as my model. You know, have his head peeking out on a recreation of Fugazi’s Steady Diet of Nothing? Been thinking about doing this for some time but have never made a proper attempt. Low fi and shitty for sure, mainly for the music heads. I don’t normally do cute but why not?

Before my dad died, I had the idea to collect a bunch of my weirdo writing into a big book. I wanted the book to be something of stature. I wanted it to take up some space. No one cares about a digital file they’ll never open. The initial idea was to collect a bunch of my writing over the past 20 years, mostly shorter pieces. No real organization to the thing just a book of weirdo observations, travel writing, and lists. When my dad died this went out the window and I focused on the book (is it a zine, not sure) about him. That took a lot of time to put together, as well as money. I got a few dollars back from that project, but very little compared to how much it cost to print and then mail. Although this wasn’t great, I was initially bothered by losing a few hundred dollars on a project. It wasn’t the end of the world to lose the money because I had it. My cheap ass was worried. No one else is going to publish it or ask me to do it, so I might as well. Next week I’m going to start in on it.

In a similar fashion, (it’s always money) I need to be more active in sending out assemblages to mail-art friends. I need to send them to folks that might appreciate them even if it costs me a whole eight dollars. I need to break the pattern of thinking that volume is the best method.  At least doing this will break the monotony of continuous manila envelopes I usually send. Not sure which mail-artists would be interested in a sign that has the word “wiener” on it.

And then there’s the one resolution that is going to be the most challenging. In the coming year, I need to change up the way I make paper collages. The process came about by accident, like most of the things I end up making. I had all of this sticker paper, mostly rejects from businesses laying around. It only made sense to place bits of cut paper to the sticky paper. When I started doing this, I completely moved away from the tape transfer method, something I played around with for years.

When I started making paper collages I found a lane pretty quickly. I was able to come up with something I found acceptable early on. When I found that I could do something with it, I forced myself to keep going. I forced myself to do the same thing over and over again for as long as I could. I knew that working with things in this way would produce different results over time. Now, a few years into playing around with things in this way, I’ve hit a wall. Although I get something I find truly great every now and again, (maybe ten percent of what I make) I’m mostly making the same thing over and over again. I have the main image, mostly of a person, and then squares and rectangles around it. Sometimes, often, I have a word to give context to the main person in question. This needs to change.

In 2025 I plan on breaking out some collage books to get more ideas. I need to work in some paint, maybe some stencils, maybe some tape transfers, but something new. Maybe I’ll try and copy a lot of other collages that I enjoy. Work with cardboard? Not sure I want to get out an exacto-knife and start cutting, that technique is just too pretty for me. I admire people that go in that direction I just don’t have the patience.

If anything, I want to get rid of the line, the dreaded line. I have no idea how to do this or even if other people see the line, but I hate the line. I hate when I put a lot of pieces together and end up with a clear line of where they were taped to each other. It’s like an addition to a building where you can tell the new part from the old. When I see this I immediately hate whatever I’ve created simply because I can see where it came together. Instead of the piece looking like a collection of small bits to me, it looks like a sloppy house addition. I’ve tried cutting things on angle but that just makes it look an ariel-view of a well-planned city. 

Lines, lines, everywhere lines.

 

I will find a way to get rid of the line.

 

 

 

Cutting Circles into Rectangles

For the past two years I’ve forced myself to make collages in almost the same way. I did this to see how things might change over time, and although they have, this process has gotten a little stale. The process I’m referring to here, are my paper collages, mostly blocky, mostly leaning on old and rotting paper. Since I’ve done things in this way for so long, the process takes little to no time, or even thought. It’s almost an assembly line of image making. I have so many of them that I’ve stopped scanning all but the larger ones. It’s been fun, but I’ve been feeling the need to change for some months.

The main problem I had with them, is that they were almost exclusively rectangle. A rectangle is a fine and generous shape, but it wasn’t keeping my interest. In each collage was a face, maybe a short phrase or sentence, and a lot of squares and small rectangles positioned around. One in ten I thought was good, which isn’t a bad average. Since I’m a mail-artist, I mail everything instead of staring over, a process that can sometimes inhabit growth. I don’t look at a subpar image and say to myself, “Toss it,” instead I say “Mail it.” Considering what I often get from folks, I doubt anyone can tell the difference. I always send something original, something worked. Never do I send images torn from an old Cosmopolitan magazine. Sorry, I had to get in a slight there. Original and ok, instead of effortless and subpar, is fine by me.

I forced myself to change things up.

I wanted to start with my well-worn process, and then try and subvert it. I made the usual rectangles but then I cut into long pieces, short pieces, and into shapes from various tools sitting on my desk. With the pieces, I fixed them into shapes, using the negative space of the cardboard backing to make a more dynamic creation. While this is nothing new to the world of collage (who cares?) it was new to me. In my mind, I was thinking about those Hans Arp chance paintings, but you know…with things touching. What ended coming out looked like the 1920’s to me, someone like Braque, less dynamic but at least similar in tone.

I really leaned into “messing up” the pieces that I had put together. What I made was quite different than what I had been making, which excited me. I have a new path forward, at least for a little while. When I looked at what I had created I wasn’t indifferent like I so often am, I was excited about the possibilities of what I could add to future creations.

Below are four images. I posted the image first, and then commented on what I see in the creation. Nothing like a fun writing exercise to keep the image making mind moving.  

 

In this first image, I’m really focusing on the little one’s eye. The baby is off to the right, and not the center of the piece. It’s not the whole face. There’s two circles of varying sizes in the image. Off to the far left is a circle that has been removed, this is my favorite part. In this collage I can really see the scrapes across the old pieces of paper. Anything that looks old, looks like it is deteriorating is always more interesting to me than something that’s bright and shiny and new. For years, I’ve been trying to get this effect in my work. For this effect, I used something that looks like a toothbrush with metal bristles. No idea how it appeared on my desk or what it’s supposed to be used for. 

 

The second image is solid. It’s slightly larger than the first, 8x10. What I like about this is exactly what I started to hate about all of my old collages, this one has movement. The lines are going in every direction. There’s no real focus here, at least not in the overall image. What I see second are the original collages that I made and then cut up. There’s an old picture from Ebert Street in there. There’s an old Winston-Salem postmark at the top. In the center are a couple line drawings that I cut out of an antique children’s book from the 1950’s. Around that image are a bunch of pieces of heavy paper I spray-painted years ago and stuck in a disused corner of my garage. Technically, it’s taken years for this image to take shape. That big black circle, the one in the top right, came from a Life magazine in the 1960’s. There’s something about cheap paper that’s magical. High gloss magazines are almost impossible for me to work with. The paper is too heavy, the color is bound to the paper. I’m always looking for the look of a fading billboard on the side of a disused highway.

 

The red is the true winner in this one. It’s bright enough to give personality to the composition, but worked enough to have it blend in with everything else. This “blending” is something that “distressing” the images helps. If your collage comes from a lot of different sources and decades, everything from magazines, coloring books, books, then the paper and ink quality is going to be different. Sometimes these differences can cause a composition to clash. When you take a wire brush or metal device to clashing images, you bring them together through negation. For this one, the destruction is tying the collage together. There’s some blue crayon in there too.

 

The last one is my least favorite. It’s the most like what I’ve done for the past couple of years. What we have here is a rectangle collage made of parts from the same source. I assume this is from an old magazine considering how the scrapes cut into the paper. The man image is a man’s face, with a woman’s face beside of his, and then two sets of arms on the bottom of the collage. What makes this look different from what I normally create, are the two breaks. In the top right I have punched out a couple circles and replaced them with smaller ones. The middle replacement, has a lot of little pieces in it. From what I can tell, that middle circle has seven different pieces of paper in it. The size of the circle is a nickel. There’s some stuff there, some things to look at in a tiny space. There’s only two pieces of paper making up that top replacement circle, the main being some old construction paper. The square on the far left is covered in some blue ink I normally use for rubber stamps. I should have rubbed out more of that ink. It’s an ok image, nothing I’ll keep.

Moving forward, I’m going to continue working this process. Maybe I work this method until I get completely bored with it? I’m excited again.